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I'll post pics of my vegetable garden if I can get it into a presentable shape. Growing plants in pots is one thing, growing them in the dry-as-a-bone Californian soil is something else. Nevertheless, I hope to harvest a few bell peppers and tomatoes this year...
Associated Press gets in on the act. Petroleum May Be Nearing a Peak
Pity the poor airlines. If the fuel gets more expensive, how will they be able to continue to wreck the atmosphere and pump up the greenhouse effect? Maybe they need a financial bailout from the "free-market" government...
Japan wants to reopen their truly nasty Monju fast breeder reactor. Must - resist - urge - to - make - Godzilla - joke.
If you haven't seen it yet, you should. British MP George Galloway tears the jokers in the US senate a new bumhole!
The environmental movement doesn't need Hollywood ''talent'' like Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore. With friends like these, ye need not enemies.
| At one point in the show they go to a village made of shit (literally, cow shit) and Diaz calls it "beautiful" and "inspiring." Yeah, just not beautiful and inspiring enough to give up any of the three mansions you own, right you disingenuous bitch? Every time she opens her gaping mouth, she spews more self-righteous bullshit all over the place. One of my favorite lines is when she says "it's kind of gotten out of hand how much of a convenience we think we need." Diaz, who makes around $20 million per picture and drives a Lexus, was able to say this with a straight face. What the hell is that supposed to mean, "convenience we think we need"? We don't need it asshole, we want it. I like being able to get hot water, hot food, and hot porn whenever I want. Just as soon as you give up your mansion and live in a shit hut with your multi-millionaire boyfriend, we might give a shit about your criticism of the modern conveniences. |
Here's your "liberal media", calling for the killing of Michael Moore. No, no, they're not fascist at all at all.
2005 May 25, Wednesday
Sorry about the lack of posts - I've been working, and gardening a lot.The U.S. government is starting to make scary noises about gasoline...those crazy left-wing conspiracy theory nutballs.
Fun in Iraq. Juan cole: Sometimes you are just screwed.
2005 May 17, Tuesday
Grim stuff: Dieoff!
Love him or hate him, Kunstler has a great way with words: After the oil is gone
One of the long running "jokes" in Ireland is that "a wee bit of global warming moit be a good ting - warm up de place a wee bit..." - Yeah, it sounds plausible on a cold January morning. Think again, my friends. If global warming halts the gulf stream, you'll be burning your children for heat.
Of course, peak oil is not the problem - the problem is that people believe that exponential growth is possible on a small, finite world. Sure, we could breed like rabbits, IF we had starships and the ability to colonise other planets. Unfortunately for us...
Albert Bartlett, physics prof. from Colorado, has been lecturing on the unsustainability of exponential economic growth for many years. He's a Malthusian (no, not one of the funny aliens from Star Trek - a follower of Thomas Malthus). Anyhow, here's a fascinating piece by Bartlett about exponential growth, and the poor prospects for continued development. Don't be put off by the maths - it's easy to read and good for yer brains. Here it be: Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis
| The world population in 1975 was estimated to be 4 billion people and it was growing at the rate of 1.9 % / yr. It is easy to calculate that at this low rate of growth the world population would double in 36 yr, the population would grow to a density of 1 person / m2 on the dry land surface of the earth (excluding Antarctica) in 550 yr, and the mass of people would equal the mass of the earth in a mere 1,620 yr! Tiny growth rates can yield incredible numbers in modest periods of time! |
| Bacteria grow by division so that 1 bacterium becomes 2, the 2 divide to give 4, the 4 divide to give 8, etc. Consider a hypothetical strain of bacteria for which this division time is 1 minute. The number of bacteria thus grows exponentially with a doubling time of 1 minute. One bacterium is put in a bottle at 11:00 a.m. and it is observed that the bottle is full of bacteria at 12:00 noon. Here is a simple example of exponential growth in a finite environment. This is mathematically identical to the case of the exponentially growing consumption of our finite resources of fossil fuels. Keep this in mind as you ponder three questions about the bacteria: (1) When was the bottle half-full? Answer: 11:59 a.m.! (2) If you were an average bacterium in the bottle, at what time would you first realize that you were running out of space?...Suppose that at 11:58 a.m. some farsighted bacteria realize that they are running out of space and consequently, with a great expenditure of effort and funds, they launch a search for new bottles. They look offshore on the outer continental shelf and in the Arctic, and at 11:59 a.m. they discover three new empty bottles. Great sighs of relief come from all the worried bacteria, because this magnificent discovery is three times the number of bottles that had hitherto been known. The discovery quadruples the total space resource known to the bacteria. Surely this will solve the problem so that the bacteria can be self-sufficient in space. The bacterial "Project Independence" must now have achieved its goal. (3) How long can the bacterial growth continue if the total space resources are quadrupled? Answer: Two more doubling times (minutes)! |
I have seen the future, and it sucks.
2005 May 13, Friday
Seymour Hersh: Iraq moving towards open civil war
Don't worry Seymour - Bush says it's going fine.
I try to get away from the energy issue for a day, go trawling through a space site, and can't get away from it: Mideast Oil Will Be More Important
| "Oil and gas are expected to account for two-thirds of global energy consumption by 2020," al-Herbish said. "Oil demand increased by more than 75 percent, from 47 million barrels per day, or bpd, in 19 70 to 83 million bpd this year. Demand is forecast to rise further, by around 30 percent or 1.5 percent annually for the next two decades, and to reach 111 million bpd by 2025." The development in natural gas deposits around the world will not ease global requirements for oil, al-Herbish said. Demand is projected to rise remorselessly in that sector as well, he said. The OPEC fund chief projected the global demand for gas would grow by 2.9 percent annually, to 30 percent of global energy consumption by 2025. About 80 percent of the incremental increase in oil demand would be in the developing countries, which together would account for 46 percent of world oil consumption by 2025, he said. |
Too many people: Zero Growth Is Too High
| If world population were to increase in the second half of the 21st Century at the same speed as it did in the second half of the 20th, it would be 18 billion by 2100, a clearly unsustainable figure. Ecological decay, use of resources, overcrowding, disease and poverty are all made worse by excess population; it is time we tackled these problem at their source. |
2005 May 11, Wednesday
British Poet Laureate John Betjeman saw it all coming years ago.
| Inexpensive Progress Encase your legs in nylons, Bestride your hills with pylons O age without a soul; Away with gentle willows And all the elmy billows That through your valleys roll. Let's say goodbye to hedges And roads with grassy edges And winding country lanes; Let all things travel faster Where motor car is master Till only Speed remains. Destroy the ancient inn-signs But strew the roads with tin signs 'Keep Left,' 'M4,' 'Keep Out!' Command, instruction, warning, Repetitive adorning The rockeried roundabout; For every raw obscenity Must have its small 'amenity,' Its patch of shaven green, And hoardings look a wonder In banks of floribunda With floodlights in between. Leave no old village standing Which could provide a landing For aeroplanes to roar, But spare such cheap defacements As huts with shattered casements Unlived-in since the war. Let no provincial High Street Which might be your or my street Look as it used to do, But let the chain stores place here Their miles of black glass facia And traffic thunder through. And if there is some scenery, Some unpretentious greenery, Surviving anywhere, It does not need protecting For soon we'll be erecting A Power Station there. When all our roads are lighted By concrete monsters sited Like gallows overhead, Bathed in the yellow vomit Each monster belches from it, We'll know that we are dead. |
| Liebig's Law of the Minimum...states that growth is controlled not by the total of resources available, but by the scarcest resource. It was originally applied to plant or crop growth. It was found that increasing the amount of plentiful nutrients did not increase growth. Only by increasing the amount of the limiting nutrient (the one most scarce in relation to "need") was growth of a plant or crop improved. |
I think it may only be a matter of time before James Howard Kunstler dies in a tragic accidental not-deliberate small plane crash. It's worth reading the comments section - he's got some intelligent posters - not ONE warbles on about being rescued by zero point energy or fusion or some other pie in the sky petroleum replacement.
| History doesn't care if we sleepwalk into a clusterfuck. Plenty of other societies have before us. The real sin in the real world is the failure to pay attention to the signals that your environment sends you. The signals aimed at us now tell us the following: the oil age is entering an unstable permanent decline; suburbia and all its usufructs is finished; the blue-light special shopping economy is about to end; easy motoring will shortly be a thing of the past; the middle class will be replaced by a new former middle class; and all bets are off as to how violently American politics will shudder when the fog finally lifts. |
| If what is left after the Big Die-off can still be called a human society, it will be bottomed out at the subsistence level of energy-use. Now that is one ugly booger of a notion to contemplate. What is subsistence level energy-use? In all likelihood it has to do with shitting in the winter darkness at a sustainable 45 indoor degrees. Meanwhile, a cockroach watches, thinking to himself, “What a shame, because at the height of their culture these guys made a damned good peanut butter sandwich.” |
| Right after World War II and the advent of the atomic bomb a majority of Americans (67% of those surveyed by Gallup) wanted a cooperative one-world government with all nuclear weapons put under the control of the United Nations. Now you cannot get an American to turn off a light switch to save human civilization. As a friend from Cape Verde once remarked, “Just watching Americans consume things gives me a headache." |
2005 May 10, Tuesday
Late for work - ah what the hell:
2005 May 9, Monday
Some heavy Monday Morning Madness:
A mind-warping analysis of oil prices in the economist. The piece explains the current high price of oil as a transient political phenomenon, as well as the result of under investment in the drilling infrastructure. Nothing to do with the fact that most oil producing nations have already peaked... The article
Compare the economist's happy-wappy article with this one from Michael C. Ruppert. Compare the total lack of numerical data in the economist piece with the plethora of information in Ruppert's.
The peak is going to happen - the only question is when. The ever optimistic USGS says sometime in the 2020s, some say it already happened, many say before 2010. pretending that it's not going to happen EVER is bizarre.
This would be funny if it weren't tragic:
| President Bush has publicly embraced hydrogen as a solution to the US's looming oil supply shortages. But, as Cal Tech Vice Provost and professor of physics David Goodstein has noted, there are only two commercially viable ways of making hydrogen. One is to make it out of methane, which is a fossil fuel. The other is to use fossil fuel to generate the electricity that is required to electrolyze water and get hydrogen. The economics of doing that are such that one ends up using the equivalent of six gallons of gasoline to make enough hydrogen to replace one gallon of gasoline. This "solution" , therefore, turns out to be no such thing. |
| The way termite guts process food could teach scientists how to produce pollution-free energy and help solve the world's imminent energy crisis. ... Nobel laureate Steven Chu urged scientists to turn their attention to finding an environmentally friendly form of fuel. In an impassioned plea to some of the world's brightest minds, he explained how he's leading by example, and encouraged others to join the effort which "may already be too late." |
2005 May 4, Wednesday
I've been extra-tired the last few weeks - nevertheless, here's some funny:
Never mind running out of oil or cheap energy. It shouldn't be too long before we run out of water: Missouri river at risk of drying to mere trickle
We're running out of sunlight: Eating fossil fuels
| At present, nearly 40% of all land-based photosynthetic capability has been appropriated by human beings. In the United States we divert more than half of the energy captured by photosynthesis. We have taken over all the prime real estate on this planet. The rest of nature is forced to make due with what is left. Plainly, this is one of the major factors in species extinctions and in ecosystem stress. |
Fascinating history lesson about the Turks, from Gary Brecher. Betcha most of the right-wing knuckleheads had no idea that the Turks loved the U.S. (until Bush screwed things up).
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